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Harper-appointed Sen. Patrick Brazeau is in the news for yet another matter relating to his treatment of women. Charged with assault and sexual assault, he is out on bail.

My complaint against Brazeau, now a party of one after the Conservatives turfed him, is more heartfelt, more cultural. To me, he embodies a misogynist attitude that blights the lives of all Canadian women, and it’s worth studying.

Brazeau and a Conservative MP named Royal Galipeau recently mocked Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence for her body, which, according to Brazeau, was unacceptably fat, and her fingernails, which, according to Galipeau, were too expensively manicured. It happened at a Conservative fundraiser, which is where these things do cluster.

If I knew what hackles were, I’d have said mine rose. Neither Brazeau nor Galipeau are what you’d call oil paintings. When handsome was handed out, they were in the wrong lineup. All the adjectives one could apply to a KFC chicken thigh would work for these two, but that would be an insult to chickens.

It would also be too easy. I didn’t go into the opinionating business because I had a talent for disapproval (although I do), I did it to pluck the pejoratives off the highest shelf, and the Star would expect no less. So here we go.

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Here’s what women endure, not just from the Brazeaus and the Galipeaus of this world, but from other women too, and from themselves. I will quote Pina Bausch.

Bausch was a German dancer and choreographer who died in 2009, just before filmmakers began work on a documentary on her life’s work. Most unfortunate, but they went ahead anyway and made Pina. You can buy it on DVD and watch it, as I did, in a detached spirit and then sit bolt upright and call in the husband. “Come see! Look at what they do with their bodies!”

I won’t go on about dancing. Like music, it is impossible to describe well in print and, like sexual intercourse, one really has to be there.

But imagine the human body as an exclamation mark — flinging itself up and down and inside-out all over this page. Halfway through this extraordinary film, a woman dancer in a doll-like dress appears stiff and still on the stage. One by one, male dancers in elegant dark suits surround her.

She is poked, stroked, her skirt raised and her thighs fondled. She is patted, shaken, jiggled, pinched, rubbed, licked and tickled by 16 hands. The men flick at her face and sneak inside her dress, they stretch her arms like tightropes and kiss along their length, they tap at the top of her feet, pick her up and vigorously shake her, the way you shake a four-year-old into her leotards. The hands pull at her earlobes, chop at her torso the way masseurs do. They examine every part of her body simultaneously, like an MRI machine made of quick hands.

She endures it all, eyes closed, utterly passive, the way you play dead after a bear mauling.

And that is what happens to women in public life. Women live this every day, every wrinkle labelled, pound weighed, body part assessed, garment judged. Men don’t have to think about what level of sexual commodification they radiate, and good for them. They sally forth dressed like Brazeaus or Galipeaus or, gawdhelpus, Harpers.

I knew Spence would be mocked for her weight. But I did not think her fingernails would enter into it. That is a Kate Middleton level of cruel scrutiny and I fail to see why one person fighting for native rights should be scorned in this way.

Women do it too, to feel part of the gang. What Dakey Dunns are some of the female commentators in this country!

So I mock them, and they mock Spence, and in the end we all lose. Women leave the house feeling like a collection of rateable bits and pieces. No wonder they aren’t brave enough to seek promotion, to demand the raise, to demand time off and still earn the doctorate.

As always, men are the gold standard in public life and women are the variants, judged on everything but their ideas. We are assessed from the hair on our head to the polish on our toes while our ideas are pushed to the back of the bus. It must cease.

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